My eyes were riveted to the headline in the newspaper (which, as John Mulaney, comedian extraordinaire, would say, “is a very old-fashioned sentence”): Man Accused of Tossing Gator at Drive-thru. I didn’t have to wonder which state this happened in, just which town—but really aren’t all Florida towns as crazy as the next?

So I read on. It seems one Joshua James, age 24, tossed a 3 ½ -foot-long alligator into a Wendy’s drive-thru window at 1:20 a.m. and drove off after the employee handed him his drink. Of course, this begs the question: where did he get an alligator? Well, this is Florida, home of the NRA (No Registration for Alligators), so James just picked up his alligator on the side of the road.

Police later located James through video surveillance and a purchase at a nearby convenience store, where he had refilled his supply of Burmese pythons, brown recluse spiders, and fire ants. The cops charged him with assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill.

But was it all just a harmless joke? Joshua’s mother says yes. “He does stuff like this because he thinks it’s funny,” she said. It was just a “stupid prank.” She went on to assure the public that “he had no trouble turning himself in.” Florida residents can also comfort themselves knowing that he has been given a restraining order that includes “all animals.”

In the aftermath of this attack, membership in another NRA group (National Retaliatory Alligators) has shot up. After all, if everyone carried alligators, events like this wouldn’t happen.

On October 7th South Miami officials passed a resolution with a vote of 3-2 to split Florida in half, and make South Florida our nation’s 51st state. I say it’s about time. As my faithful readers know, I grew up in Hollywood, Florida, and have borne the scars ever since. Yeah, most of them are from mosquito bites I shouldn’t have scratched, but the others are deeply etched in my psyche and impossible to eradicate—kind of like the cockroach that once emerged from under our sofa dragging the roach motel (“roaches check in but they don’t check out”) behind him with one leg.

I empathize with the local politicians. South Florida and North Florida are as different as alligators and crocodiles; they may seem the same, but I assure you they are not. For one thing alligators are memorialized with a state highway (Alligator Alley), and crocodiles are celebrated in song (Crocodile Rock). South Florida has beautiful waterways; white, sandy beaches; and, most recently, the woman who set her boyfriend on fire in retaliation for his throwing away her spaghetti dinner. North Florida spawned the beloved phrase “Don’t tase me, bro,” educated the man who asked Siri how to dump a body, and….umm….who knows? The only things I remember about northern Florida while driving in and out of the state during summer vacations were the violent thunder storms and blinding rain that hit as soon as we were in sight of the “Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State” sign.

Miami’s Vice Mayor Walter Harris states that the pols in Tallahassee don’t understand the environmental concerns of the south. This is probably true—for unless you live it, you can’t possibly comprehend it. One danger facing South Florida is the rising sea level due to climate change. In the north they may think this means better surfing. But southerners know that it won’t be long before way-too-revealing itty-bitty swimsuit-wearing tourists will be forced inland and, like the walking dead, wander downtowns in search of beaches that have been swallowed by the ocean.

Those northern bureaucrats also don’t have to manage the Everglades, where pythons the length of three Jane Lynches or four Kristen Chenoweths and capable of swallowing an entire deer whole slither around at will. Although police in the north did recently have to arrest a naked 500-pound man who couldn’t fit into the cruiser—so who’s to say where the real weirdness lies.

All I can say is, “Ai Ai Ai!”Image courtesy Care2

Miami’s Mayor Philip Stoddard went even further than Harris, expressing his frustration this way: “It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean. They’ve made that abundantly clear at every possible opportunity, and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that.”

If the north is actually sharpening its saws, they might find another willing participant in Colin Woodard, who in late 2013 wrote the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Woodard suggests that America can be divided into The Left Coast, The Far West, El Norte, The Midlands, Yankeedom, Greater Appalachia, New Netherland, Tidewater, New France, and The Deep South.

Where does South Florida fit into his vision of America? Nowhere, that’s where. While Woodard includes the northern counties of Florida in The Deep South, the southern counties are only mentioned in a parenthesis floating in the Atlantic that reads (Part of the Spanish Caribbean).

To this I take exception. Yes, the north has St. Augustine and the Fountain of Youth and lays claim to the oldest jail, oldest wooden schoolhouse, oldest drugstore, and oldest house. But South Florida trumps that with the oldest oldies and so much more!

Would not America be much less rich without South Florida’s Monkey Jungle, Parrot Jungle, Jungle Island, and the JungleQueen Riverboat? In fact, any citizen of this swampy landmass could enclose a patch of ground and proudly create his or her own Lizard Jungle, Anole Jungle, Assassin Bug and his sidekick Masked Hunter Jungle (lovely), Hag Moth Jungle (lovelier), Horse Lubber Grasshopper Jungle (one of my personal favorites since we basically had one of these attractions in our backyard, and I could tell that spring had sprung when the odor of these grasshoppers’ “spit” filled the air), Spiny Backed Orb Weaver Jungle (another “favorite” that appeared everywhere in our yard. Empty “orbs” of these spiders were the most frightening because you never knew if the spiky, dangerous creatures were crawling up your arm or your back).

The Assassin–known for its horrible sting…

…and its sidekick Masked Hunter!!

This creature is so sturdy you could put a leash on it and keep it as a pet. The “puppies” start out black with a red or yellow line running down the center of their back.

Beware the prongs of this dreaded predator!!Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons

So you can see that South Florida could more than hold its own as the 51st state. But two questions remain—where would the border be drawn and what would the new state be called?

Mayor Stoddard has designated a dividing line along Brevard, Orange, Polk, Hillsborough, and Pinellas counties. This area includes the South Florida Water Management district; Lake Okeechobee, a major source of the state’s water; and Disney World. The politicians’ plan may sound foolish, but they’re no fools.

Here is how the map of a divided Florida would look. You’ll notice the little jog to collect Disney World, hereafter to be known as Fantasy Jungle.Image courtesy of Charles Minshew, Sun Sentinel

But what to name the new state? As a fan of anagrams, I wondered if scrambling the letters of South Florida would provide any possibilities. I was not disappointed:

Hairdo Flouts: if there’s one thing I remember from my time in Florida, it’s women—and men—flouting their hair. Of course it was the time of luxurious locks ala Farrah Fawcett and young Shawn Cassidy.

Who could live up to this?

Unfortunately, my hair tended more toward his than hers…but even this amount of “poofyness” was out of my reach.

Hi Fraud Tools/Hi Fraud’s Loot: Since South Florida is a hotbed of illicit activity, I thought either of these might fit the bill.

Ooh! Tidal Surf: I was never a surfer chick, but the high number of bronze bodies that ride the waves puts this one in the running.

Dilators of Uh…: It must be the hot sun (or maybe number 2 above) that fries so many brains, but South Florida has more of than its share of wide-eyed, lights- are-on-but-nobody’s-home residents.

Oh Adrift Soul: for the poetic-minded

Uh…Adrift Solo: for the truly lost

Or, simply, as my daughter Jenny suggested:

Crazy Town

Creating a new state takes an act of Congress, so I implore you to write your congresswoman or man and register your vote to make South Florida the new star on our flag. With your help, this nation may just become a little crazier.

Hi, and welcome to Wit Love, Kath, my love letters about the funny side of life. Here I’ll look at the quirks and absurdities of family life, national and world news, entertainment, politics (oh, wait, I just mentioned entertainment), sports, and all those unexpected, bizarre moments that make life worthwhile with humor, with skepticism, with irony, and always wit love.

I grew up in a pink stucco house in Hollywood, Florida, surrounded, not by the radiance of celebrities as in that other Hollywood, but by the relentless sun (except for the daily deluge), which produces, like a science-fiction laser, grapefruit you can use as bowling balls, dachshund-sized avocados, and toads as round as dinner plates.

School field trips were spent at Parrot Jungle (once home to Pinky, the “high-wire, bicycle-riding cockatoo,” where we each had our picture taken with 5 macaws perched on our scrawny outstretched arms); Monkey Jungle (“where the humans are caged and monkeys run wild”), and Gatorland (“when the sun goes down, the swamp comes alive”). Try fitting education like this into the Common Core.

Spending your formative years in this over-the-top, larger-than-life (see, even the adjectives are abnormally big) weirdness-incubating local does something to you. One can only witness so many middle-aged and end-aged tourists in speedos before the mind is irreversibly warped. Same goes for the absolute cemetification of every square inch of available land. Even the strip malls have strip malls. The blistering sun bouncing off all that concrete really does fry your brain.

Don’t believe me? How else to explain this recent development: towns in southern Broward and Dade counties are using the optical illusion of decreasingly spaced lines to trick drivers into believing they are going faster than they are, thus causing them to “tap the break,” according to a local official. What’s next? M.C. Escher as stairwell architect?

And when your newspaper has a regular category called “Snakebites,” you know there’s something twisted going on. Here’s the latest headline from the Miami Herald, printed Sunday, October 13: “Man Bitten by Rattlesnake in Broward County while Helping Turtle Cross 1-75.” Couldn’t this unfortunate scout find any old ladies to help across the road? In South Florida?

With these kinds of daily, riveting reports, it’s no surprise that I became a news and comics page junkie at a young age. I read the Miami Herald before school and the Hollywood Sun-Tattler when I came home. I listened to Dan Rather before he had “courage” (I suspect he spent time in South Florida before this pronouncement, as I and my friends fully understood his counsel). Garry Trudeau taught me more about politics than any civics class, and Dave Barry and The Far Side’s Gary Larson gave me laugh-out-loud validation that I was not crazy.

In college I studied absurdist literature—the likes of Samuel Beckett and Nikoli Gogol. My adviser couldn’t understand what I saw in it, but I never blinked an eye. Two tramps eternally waiting? A human pack mule? Disembodied voices? Got it. A man who loses his nose? Check. In fact, I think it was found floating in a canal along Alligator Alley.

I now live in Connecticut, where the state flower is the rock, squirrels think they’re birds except when they’re playing kamikaze in front of a moving car, and on any given day deer, wild turkeys, chipmunks, squirrels, foxes, ground hogs, rabbits, skunks, raccoons, and/or fisher cats can parade through our yard and nom our garden. It may not be as exciting as Florida, but, hey, at least none of them are wearing speedos.